Saturday, March 21, 2009

The soul of pleasure

When communism ruled in Czechoslovakia, rock groups were forced to please the party with their albums - or face obstruction - or worse. One of the more artistically successful bands of that time was Skupina pro Dustojny Zivot, a quintet from Presov, who have now reformed under the translated English name Party for Dignified Life, aiming at an international career. They have re-recorded their greatest Czech hits of the eighties in English versions, and although some couleur locale is lost this way, the results are still very interesting. Their sound is perhaps best characterized as new wave with plenty of synthesizers, rocking guitars and a drum machine that sounds terribly dated, but in a cute way. The songs deal with typical themes of the life in communist times, and one cannot help but feel that there is more than a bit of tongue-in-cheek in these reissued versions. An interesting addition to any collection, if not essential.

The idea of this little game is to create an album cover for an imaginary artist/group, as well as an imaginary review, following these instructions:

[1] The artist/group: go to the wiki random page generator. The first random Wikipedia article obtained this way is the name of the band or performer. In this case, I ended up with Party for Dignified Life.[2] The title: go to the random quotations site. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of the album. The random quote that came up was by Aphra Behn: Variety is the soul of pleasure.[3] The illustration: pick a suitable one from my Flickr collection. My picture, Communism in Presov, can be found here on Flickr. The on-line editing was done with the programme On-line image editor, the font settings selected were Monotype Corsiva 85 Gold Metallic and Rebecca 60 Silver, respectively.

Note: this is a variation on the "Debut album game" that has been making its rounds around bulletin boards and blogs for some time now - the original version called for a random Flickr Explore photograph to be used as the cover. I have been trying to find out who had the original idea, but so far no success.

The Blogger

About me:Dutchman, married to a beautiful and highly talented artist from Shanghai. Although my education (PhD chemistry) is very much associated with the left side of the brain, I like to use my right side for my hobbies: music, art, photography.

About this blog:I started this blog in August 2006, just wanting to share what I considered interesting pieces of visual art and music. I suffered from blogging blues for most of 2008, but making a fresh start in October of that year has done wonders for my inspiration.In case you did not notice, most posts end with a small symbol... just click that for the relevant link.All pictures in my blog are hosted on blogger - if some do not show up (the red cross syndrome) it is a blogger hiccup. Right click and selecting "show picture" should do the trick.

About the reconstruction:

End March 2017 I converted thousands of posts to draft, in order to sort out potential copyright issues. Many of these have been restored in the course of the year.

Links of interest

Reactions

Reactions: please send an email to artrock2006@gmail.com or leave a comment on FaceBook.

Copyright issues?

Most of the images used in this blog are either mine, or they are used with explicit permission of the creators, or they are in the public domain. Album cover and movie poster images are sourced on the internet and they are considered fair use for discussion at a non-profit blog.

The magnifying glass based images that occur once in a while have been put in place to show images at thumbnail size, this being considered fair use (link).

If you still find a picture on this blog that you are the copyright owner of, and object against the use, please drop me an email and I will remove it.